8,500 Premises in Cudworth Get Virgin Media’s UK Gigabit FTTP
Some 8,500 premises in the large urban village of Cudworth (South Yorkshire) have become the latest to go live on Virgin Media’s new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband and TV network, which at present can deliver average download speeds of 516Mbps and this will be upgraded to support 1Gbps in the near future.
As usual the local roll-out forms part of Virgin Media’s Project Lightning build, which aims to add an additional 3-4 million premises to their UK coverage (so far they’ve completed around 2 million) using a mix of FTTP via Radio Frequency Over Glass (RFoG) and Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) technology. Both methods make use of the DOCSIS standard so as to harness the same consumer hardware.
On top of that VM recently started to deploy their new DOCSIS 3.1 network upgrade (here), which by the end of 2021 aims to have boosted their top broadband download speeds to 1Gbps+ across the United Kingdom (currently live around Southampton, Greater Manchester and Reading).
Hugh Woolford, VM’s Regional Director Yorkshire, said:
“We are delighted to have completed our expansion works in Cudworth which will give residents and businesses a huge digital boost. They’ll be able to benefit from the boost in connectivity that our ultrafast broadband provides, and better connectivity means better browsing, streaming, downloading and working.”
End.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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loving all the altnets… beating the incumbents copper hands down.
Not sure I would call VM an altnet but it’s an interesting thought. What precisely is the definition of an altnet? Defined by % market share? Anyone that isn’t Openreach?
Officially Virgin Media is not designated as an alternative network by the Government or Ofcom, at least not that I’m aware of, although there doesn’t appear to be a strict definition.
VM is mostly delivered by HFC which is coaxial (drum roll) COPPER…..
It is only the newest bits of network that use pure full fibre.
It’s 8,500 premises passed with a reaction connected so most don’t count in the telecoms world according to rural offnets.
A fraction connected even. It’s the return of the premises passed ‘scam’
@CC – ‘beating’? Do you have connected numbers, which you ask for elsewhere?
seem to be a bit thin on the ground don’t they? Facts. If it is FTTH then no coaxil is used apart from a few inches in the house for the cpe unless they have started rolling out routers with optics in, but Virgin are laying real fibre. Virgin were the first altnet, but for them we’d all still be on dial up.
Thanks to the Thatcher government you mean. Who prevented BT rolling out fibre in the 80’s.
Taken VM 30 years to get round to FTTP.
I’d be interested to know the rough % of FTTP on VM.
I’d be surprised (and pleased) if it was over the 10-15% of their live network ATM.
As I understand it, it is only the Project Lightening areas that have VM FTTP.
CarlT might be able to shed some Facts on this debate!
Under 10% Monsieur Builder.
Somewhere between 750,000 and 1.25 million out of just under 14.5 million premises passed.
Openreach have more premises passed with FTTP and will overtake as a proportion of the network in 2020.
Just over 14.5 million passed, sorry.
If you prefer, a little over 5.5 million total passed of which less than 200,000 are FTTP in rural altnet speak where it apparently doesn’t count unless actually connected.
“Thanks to the Thatcher government you mean. Who prevented BT rolling out fibre in the 80’s.”
As usual, a totally misleading post here. Nobody has prevented BT from doing fibre for many years now.
Come back to the real world here! Nobody forces you to be a BT shareholder.
Strange how Openreach had to get permission from Ofcom to vary various things to allow them to deploy FTTP in 2008-9.
Almost like there were things stopping them and they had to ask Ofcom to remove obstacles.
Much as they a having to again to be permitted to withdraw copper.
It’s interesting to see inside of those cabinets, we had these installed together with a lot of trenching in my street a few years ago but they have yet to have anything go live and I believe they still empty.
Is it just me or do they look completely passive? Surprised that they needed to put insulation on the side panels.
Yes, they are entirely passive.
The cabinets are probably dual purpose and require insulation for other purposes.
Don’t forget the insulation is just as much to stop the cabinets superheating in direct sunlight as to prevent the temp crashing and condensation issues from temp cycling.
OK pure FTTP shouldn’t be affected by these things but decreasing thermal stress cycling is always sensible.